Post navigation

Self-publishing or traditional: prestige & quality

If you’re trying to choose between self-publishing and traditional publishing, you need to think about quality and prestige.

You should already know what your book is for and the order of your priorities. For a lot of entrepreneurs, raising their status is a biggie. But think carefully: is it your status or your profile that you want to raise? There’s a difference. Your status is your prestige: how significant people think you are. Your profile is how many people know about you and think that.

Traditional publishers are the stamp of approval and the gatekeepers of quality. They are not the only stamp of approval or the only gate that quality can go through.

Prestige: where’s it coming from?

Most thought leaders look to their book to raise their prestige. It demonstrates their expertise, yes, but the sheer fact of having written a book says something, right? Yes and no. It says you’ve bothered to write an entire book, but not that it’s any good. That logo on the cover says this book will be good: whatever you may think of the ideas, it will be substantial, polished, and well-organised.

If your credibility is already established, you don’t necessarily need that publisher’s logo to speak for you. Maybe your name already speaks volumes. If you’re aiming to establish your credibility, that logo is more important. Prejudice against self-publishing persists, whether we like it or not, so self-publishing your book doesn’t automatically give you kudos. That prejudice is there for a good and embarrassing reason: a lot of self-published work sucks. If you’re going to self-publish, know that you must combat that prejudice: make your book great. You can build your own credibility – but not without quality.

Quality

Traditional publishers are still the gatekeepers of quality. They’re not a spiteful hegemony, clinging to power and stamping on genius through instinctive risk-aversion, blind to brilliance. If you’ve ever seen some of the stuff they turn down, you’ll realise their worth. And once you’ve been through the book-creation process, their timescales stop looking so insane. Slow, yes, but not insane. Quality takes time.

If you aren’t using a traditional publisher, you’re responsible for your own quality. The best you can possibly make it is your starting point for quality, not finished perfection. From there, you need to get your own guardians and gatekeepers. You need…

Editorial reviews and critiques: These are the equivalent of a commissioning editor’s feedback, telling you what’s working, what’s not, what to cut, where to add. Get a professional – friends and family are notoriously unreliable for feedback.

Editing: If your book’s passed its final review, this should just be style editing: smoothing out the language to make sure it flows, the tone is right, and the language is appropriate. If you skip out the review stage or are struggling with the organisation, this might be a structural edit: rearranging the content and flagging up holes for filling. Editing makes sure that your book reads easily.

Proofreading: This is the final step before your book goes to print, to check every comma is in place, every sentence is grammatical, and no embarrassing typos will jar the text. Again, use a professional for this: anyone who can’t tell you the difference between an em-dash and an en-dash, who doesn’t have opinions on the Oxford comma, and doesn’t care whether it’s “learned” or “learnt” isn’t good enough. Find someone who is.

As well as the quality of the text, you also need to care about the quality of the book: the layout, the cover design, and the physical object itself – the paper, the binding, the type of cover. Some self-publishing companies publish quality books. Some produce weird plasticky flappy things with curling covers.

At every stage of this process, you’ll have people to help you and pass you on to the next person, and they’ll all care passionately. Editors and proofreaders have arguments about commas and tell jokes about them. Layout designers and typographers are enraged by ugly “g”s and fall in love with fonts. (Top test: say “Comic sans serif” and if your designer doesn’t explode, find another one.) True book-lovers twitch at the mention of “glue-binding”, purr about stitch-binding, and bang on about the grain of paper. The level of quality you finally go for will depend on many things – but all these people care about it, passionately, and you need to, as well.

Self-publishing is the right choice for many people – Julia Cameron won’t even consider anything else. Is it right for you?

YOUR THOUGHTS:

If you self-publish, where will your book’s credibility initially come from?___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If you self-publish, who will be your guardian of quality?___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

10 thoughts on “Self-publishing or traditional: prestige & quality”

Those questions that you give are two of the critical aspects if one goes to self publishing: credibility and quality. That is the reason why it is important to make sure that the self publishing company that one chooses will give excellent services such as editing, proofreading, designing, etc. But as for me, I need to be the guardian of quality for my own book. I want to personalize it as much as I want it to be.

That’s an excellent point, Selfpub, and I think a major draw for many people, especially in the more creative fields. A recent book I worked on, Dinosaurs From Rock from Dotnamestudios (The Dinosaur Zoo people), was very much that: a whole, consistent vision where the design and content were so integrated that it just wouldn’t make sense for one person to write it and someone else to take over. I talk about that creative control in the last of the self-publishing versus traditional publishing posts: Time, money, and creative control. Also, a certain perfectionism often comes with creativity: that vision and desire to personalise is usually tied to caring about every detail, so a tight rein is kept on every aspect of quality.

Many of the people I work with, though, are entrepreneurs or business experts with all the knowledge and expertise for the content, but who aren’t writers or designers, and don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of publishing. In those cases, it’s valuable to know what a traditional publisher does, so that you can emulate those quality-control steps if you self-publish.

That’s a good point you got there Megan about people of authorities in their field of expertise who are not familiar or don’t have any idea at all when it comes to publishing. It would be nice if those book publishers will not take it as an oppurtunity and offer them unnecessary services. We can only hope that those people will conduct some research first about how to self-publish before they start their way in publishing their books to the public.

Absolutely. Also, to let people know when their books aren’t yet ready for publication – even if that means delaying a profitable job. As an editor or publisher one might want to take the job sooner, but it takes integrity to say that it’s not ready yet.

(I also find that the crucial reviewing-editor stage often gets left out, even by self-publishing companies that include excellent style editing and proofreading. Many of the books I see need developmental editing at that earlier stage, where we’re still looking at rewrites and adding content rather than polishing the prose. That’s why I started offering reviews and book coaching.)

What you have started Megan is really great and helpful to the self-publishing community. I wish you have twitter or facebook buttons in your posts so that I can easily twit and share your posts on the two mentioned social media sites. Kudos Megan!

Thanks! I don’t yet have Twitter or Facebook for my work on Thought Leader Books – but do feel free to link to the blog posts! (I also work on fiction, as Writers’ Circle, @WritersCircleMK and https://www.facebook.com/writingcourses but I keep these a bit separate as the audiences need quite different support. But you’re motivating me to sort out a Thought Leader Books Twitter account, thanks!